Thursday, March 21, 2013

RCI Cybermagazine

Long-time medical marijuana promoter Sam Mellace is opening a medical clinic at the end of this month. By this time next year, he hopes to be the first regulated medical marijuana distributor in Canada--dispensing the herb at his clinic.

In a ceremony last week, Mr. Mallace dedicated the New Age Medical Clinic to the former leader of Canada's New Democratic Party, Jack Layton, who died of cancer in 2011.

The clinic will be a full-service provider with two general practitioners on staff along with a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a naturopath. Mr. Mallace hopes the Danforth facility will serve as a prototype for many others.

Piracy seems not to be much in the news lately, but that hardly means it’s still not a major issue in seas around the world.

It’s estimated that between taxpayer-funded international naval patrols on one hand and increased insurance, fuel and ransoms paid by shippers on the other, piracy costs somewhere between seven and twelve billion dollars a year.

What’s little known is that almost a third of the pirates are juveniles, or even children as young as 10 or 11 years old.

Professor Hugh Williamson , lead investigator of the Dalhousie Univeristy Marine Piracy Project says, “ You can get killed just as easily by a 10-year-old as by a 30-year-old”.

He's been working with international groups, such as former Canadian general Romeo Dallaire's "Child Soldier Initiative" and others, to develop solutions to end recruitment of children, and to rehabilitate child pirates who are arrested.

Cyberattacks crashed computer networks at major South Korean banks and top TV stations on Wednesday. Experts suspect North Korea orchestrated the attack but police and South Korean officials could not confirm. The attacks add to rising tensions in the region.

The attacks “certainly are very devastating,” said Charles Burton, associate professor of political science at Brock University in Ontario and a former advisor to the Canadian embassy in Beijing. “…quite disrupting and sending out a strong signal …to South Korea that the North could cause them quite a lot of trouble if the South doesn’t comply with what the North wants them to do.”

While there is no confirmation that North Korea orchestrated the cyber-attacks, last year it did threaten several South Korean broadcasters because they aired reports critical of North Korean children’s festivals.

As the future of the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico continues to be debated in Canada and the US, the much-maligned oil sands project (at least by most environmentalists) has suffered a public relations blow. [...]